017 This month’s tip:

Sometimes, you just have to push harder.

It may be a local phenomena, but a lot of the people we talk to on a daily basis have mentioned that in this New Year, they don't feel all that "new." That is, they didn't pick up their usual sense of renewal when passing January 1, 2005, and still feel stuck with the concerns of late December. It may be because the news since then has been so relentlessly full of death and destruction. Maybe it's cosmic rays, or sunspots or global warming...

So this month's tip is that while motivation is all well and good, sometimes -- motivated or not -- you have to push past whatever is holding you back. You have to trust in your ability to get to the other side.

That's a lot more touchy-feely than the kind of tip we usually include, but this year it seems like the right thing to say. Take a deep breath, and work harder. In the words of John Gorka: "There's random bad and random good. Work brings more luck than knocking on wood."
 

January 2005 - Volume 3, Issue 1

New Years, New Opportunities

Welcome to the sixth year of the new Millennium. (Or the fifth year, if you're one of those Y2K sticklers.) We're now solidly into January, and perhaps reflecting on all the things we didn't do under the pressures of the holiday season. Now is the time to do them.

The first month of the New Year is always a good time to connect with people you haven't talked (or written) to in a while. It's a good time to flip through your address book and reach out. In past issues of Directions, we've repeatedly made the point that human communication works best between trusted parties, and that trust is built and maintained by casual social contact. Whatever resolutions you've made to be healthier, or more organized or otherwise new and improved, it's worth resolving to be more in touch with your people.

It's also worth doing something with the knowledge you gain from these human connections. Some years ago, we outlined a knowledge-sharing program based on the Six Degrees of Separation idea. The concept was to find the people in an organization who were particularly well-connected: people who knew lots of other people. New ideas could be percolated through the enterprise much more rapidly if these highly connected super-nodes were in the front rank of a communication campaign. Rather than a traditional top-down approach (where managers communicate to their subordinates), the Six Degrees approach can reach almost everywhere at the speed of a good joke.

So recognize that you are, yourself, a node in a larger network of thought and information. Reconnect to the people around you, find out what's happening with them, and then spread the word. Any investment in improving the quality of your network will pay off over time.

Avis Goes Live

Avis Dentistry is a practice in Staten Island, New York, with an interesting history. Dr. Victor Avis is the third generation to be running the show, taking on the management of a practice founded by grandfather Harry.

Victor had a vision of a different kind of dentistry, with an emphasis on treating the entire patient rather than considering dental health one cavity at a time. In addition to simplifying his operation to provide higher quality care for a smaller number of patients, Avis wanted to explore what newer, web-based technologies could offer to his patient community. At Avis, patients are really more like family.

When he came to Knowledge Street, Dr. Avis already had a website, but it was a simple, cookie-cutter kind of structure that did nothing to suggest the unique personality of this group. It had been built as a student project, and couldn't be updated by anyone currently at the practice. We designed and built an entirely new site, with a new look and feel, incorporating parts of the Avis history, profiles of the employees, patient information and dental case studies. We also integrated two blog feeds with the HTML pages, so the folks at Avis can update parts of the site themselves, posting news items and maintaining an event calendar. The final site went live in December, and you can take a look here.

If you live or work in the area and are in need of dentist, you should make an appointment! Tell them Knowledge Street sent you.

Message in a Matrix

Delivering a particular message to a target audience -- even a relatively simple message -- can be a challenge.

People respond to different media in different ways, and if you want good coverage, you have to use more than one channel. Some people will be most accessible to information delivered on the web, since it lets them choose the time and place for the transaction. Other people like the old-fashioned but high-touch approach of direct mail. Collateral channels like press releases can reinforce a message that's delivered in more direct ways.

In addition to the complexity of possible channels, messages always have multiple components -- "messagelets," if you will. In a new product announcement (for example), the messagelets are things like "innovative" or "lowest price" or "proven."

In a lot of our communication work, we find it's helpful to break messages down and present them in a matrix. The rows represent messages (and messagelets), and the columns represent channels over which the message is to be delivered. By putting checks in the boxes you create a big picture view of the program, and that helps in several ways. Presenting messages in this elemental form helps break whatever patterns of marketing language have been used in the past. Looking at the columns for message delivery helps create more variety in the final communications, since clients can see they don't need to hit on the "innovative" aspect every, single time.

There's an art to building the matrices, and it takes time to get them right. But it's proven a real time-saver for us in the long run, while also letting the client be more firmly in control of the outcomes.

Did you hear the one about...?

There's a lot to be said for having fun at work, and Ben & Jerry’s success has a lot to do with their approach to business: if it's not fun, why do it?

Research tells us the most productive employees are the ones who like being there. They experience increased job satisfaction, are more loyal, and more committed to success. This is true in every industry and every marketplace, and any organization can benefit from encouraging people (both clients and employees) to lighten up a little. Here's why:

• Laughing is good for you. It lowers blood pressure and reduces stress hormones. It raises levels of infection-fighting T-cells. It increases blood flow to the brain, enabling clearer and more creative thought. And don't forget about all those endorphins that are released when you laugh. Endorphins are the body's natural painkillers.

• Laughing is contagious. Laughter is interesting in its ability to cause more laughter. It appears that humans have auditory humor detectors - neural circuits that respond exclusively to the sounds made while laughing. These detectors trigger the neural circuits that generate laughter, even if you didn't get the joke. Shared laughter also promotes unity within a group, creating a comfort zone that encourages creativity and the sharing of ideas.

Of course, you may feel that you are one of the humor-impaired. If so, it's best not to try too hard to be funny at all once. You'll only upset people. Otherwise, the next time being at work seems like watching paint dry, liven things up. Have you heard the one about the Volkswagen, the shoe salesman and the strawberry milkshake?

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